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I received a pretty interesting email this weekend regarding an online contact lens company that many of you have probably seen pop up on your Facebook feed (according to their email you will soon see them in mainstream media as well) they are called Hubble. I found it interesting and I thought I would share with you my email (the sender’s name has been blacked out) because I need my patients to know and be aware of what these schemes are all about. See the email below:

A snippet from the email is shown below. This is being completely transparent with you and how much these lenses could potentially cost you and how much we could make off selling them. WE are, however, concentrated on the health of the eyes that have been entrusted to us–not making a buck here.

At face value, one might look at this and say, “Wow that’s a cheaper lens,” not me! Immediately, I recognized the material, being that I have been prescribing contact lenses for 15+ years it rang a bell that I decided to dig a little deeper. Check out the facts below (credit http://www.CooperVision.com):

And then a simple Google search of “Vertex Contact Lenses” found:

So, what is the deal here? I’m not going to sit here and implicate but I am going to state facts. It was well known and documented by doctors that private label contact lenses exist. Many lenses are the same and relabeled due to negotiations from corporate buying groups and such. The best thing to ever happen to contact lenses is UPP which stands for Universal Pricing Policy and most contact lens manufacturers are going toward that. What UPP has done is bring everything to same price point and protect patients from getting unauthorized, uncertified contact lenses for the sake of saving a few dollars. On the flip side, some of these online retailers are not obtaining their lenses from the manufacturer and you could be receiving rebranded, inaccurate contact lenses. Contact lens manufacturers like Alcon are now providing a Gold Seal of Authenticity to assure you are receiving the correct lenses for an authorized source.

Dr. Peter Cass of Beaumont Family Eye Care with Dr. Gee during a demonstration of the new lens. This morning the discussion among the attendees have been that they can’t even tell the lenses are in their eyes! Most had to think twice to take them out last night…talk about comfort!